Monday, October 31, 2016

Now and then, instead of writing too much on topics that maybe I shouldn't, I will reference an article by someone else that in my judgement is worth reading.

Atheist (and ex-Muslim) Kavah Mousavi (pseudonym) accurately characterizes the Southern Poverty Law Center's unconscionable placement of Maajid Nawaz on its list of 15 anti-Muslim extremists as "atrocious" for "misusing the tragic fact of anti-Muslim bigotry in the West to silence honest criticisms of Islam by mixing internal dissidents with bigots." He also criticizes their placing the anti-Muslim extremist label on Ayaan Hirsi Ali for some statements she made years ago that are quoted by SPLC out of context. Read his "Shame on you SPLC" article on his blog titled On the Margin of Error.

Now I will add my own voice here. One of the SPLC's arguments for labeling Ayaan Hirsi Ali an anti-Muslim extremist is that a film she co-produced, Submission, provoked threats against her and the murder of the other film producer, Theo Van Gogh. By citing the murder of the film's other producer as evidence that she is an extremist the SPLC is openly and shamelessly siding with violent Islamic fascists against liberalism. This is probably a double standard, as the SPLC does not cite being targeted for murder when dissenting from popular opinion within any other religion as evidence for the targeted individual being an extremist.

The SPLC cited as evidence for Maajid Nawaz being an extremist that he endorsed one of the Jesus and Mo cartoons. They are wonderful cartoons, reading those cartoons is better than reading the Quran, Bible, or Tanakh. What SPLC is doing here is not only anti-intellectual and anti-fun, it is also sick crazy, like labeling someone an anti-Jewish extremist because they eat pork. There is nothing ethical about requiring everyone to obey the restrictions that other people claim their version of their religion imposes. The Jesus and Mo cartoon lampoons Judaism and Christianity together with Islam. Therefore it cannot be the actual contents of that cartoon that is at issue here unless everyone who likes those cartoons is also an anti-Christian and anti-Jewish extremist. But SPLC doesn't associate those equivalent labels with that cartoon, apparently because Jews and Christians have the good sense not to riot in the streets over cartoons.

SPLC's illogic appears to be a product of an unprincipled and unhinged post-modernist relativism where being extremist is misdefined as contradicting whatever the most vocal and intolerant segment of a population demands, particular if their demands are sometimes backed by threats of, or acts of, murder, regardless of whether their demands are reasonable or fair on the merits. The SPLC actually cites the prevalence of a belief, as if that renders it unassailable in the sense that criticizing that belief becomes evidence for being an extremist. Has it ever occurred to the SPLC that some of the ideas favored by a large number of Muslims (dare I say it, maybe even a majority of today's Muslims world wide!) could themselves sometimes be extreme and unethical and therefore openly disagreeing with that majority over that idea will be the more moderate, ethical, stance? Can anyone who has read any history honestly think that the majority held view is always ethical? That opposing a majority view is ipso facto evidence of extremism?

Oops, now I am an anti-Muslim extremist because I offended millions of Muslims by linking to the critical Submission film and to the Jesus and Mo cartoons. Kavah Mousavi is correct, the SPLC has turned being designated an anti-Muslim extremist by them into an honor. The SPLC is totally fucking up here, big time.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

The
movie Snowden
(2016) by Oliver Stone again raises the issues that Snowden himself
raised in 2013. How much electronic surveillance should the federal
government be allowed to do in pursuit of a small number of
terrorists? Unfortunately, the movie doesn't give an answer. It
does give some background on Edward Snowden.

According
to the movie, Snowden (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was deeply
affected by the events of 9/11/01. As a patriotic young man, he
first joined the U.S. Army Special Forces, but he shattered his legs
during basic training. He got a job with the CIA in 2006 and wrote
an important program designed to back up huge amounts of data. The
program later found uses in other unintended areas including
targeting drone strikes.

He
had a series of intelligence positions as a contractor until 2013.
In the process, he became familiar with the U.S. Government program
for mass data collection of both U.S. citizens and noncitizens,
including phone calls, email, and social media. The movie
illustrates how easily this database can be searched for personal
information on essentially anyone. Snowdon admitted to using it once
to check on his girlfriend.

The
goal of the data collection is to look for terrorist networks. But a
search to the third degree of separation (searches of all contacts of
contacts of contacts of a suspect) gives over 2 million people, whose
data could be viewed with no need of a specific court order or
informed consent. So if you happen to have the same dentist or
delivery person or Facebook friend as a terrorist suspect, the NSA
can search all your email for anything that looks incriminating or
that looks like you are connected to any other terrorist suspect.

Snowden
felt obligated to report this surveillance to the press, even though
he knew that such an act would make him a criminal and a target of
all the U.S. intelligence agencies, cause him lose his job in Hawaii
and his security clearance, and threaten his relationship with his
long-time girlfriend.

A
problem with the movie is the depiction of Snowden's personality.
The movie has the "feel" of a fictional movie story.
Perhaps that is just Oliver Stone's directoral style. Snowden
appears in person at the end of the movie in a cameo. There are
documentaries and interviews of Snowden himself, for example the
documenary Citizenfour
by Laura Poitras. (Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Ewen MacAskill were
the first journalists that Snowden talked to in Hong Kong.) Snowden
was also interviewed remotely in a public event at Johns Hopkins
University while he was in Russia [1]. So there are sources for
seeing Snowden himself on video without the filter of a movie.

Snowden
doesn't seem like a movie star or a narcissist, just a fairly
average, smart, computer nerd. He seems to have remarkably calm
attitude about his actions. Perhaps he has developed a emotional
detachment from his chosen role as the center of a world-wide
controversy and as a person taking on the federal intelligence
agencies. That kind of attitude is not easily captured by actors.

It
is hard to see Edward Snowden and his background and call him a
traitor to the U.S. This is a clear message of the movie. He hasn't
done anything to hurt the U.S. for his personal gain. He claims no
one has been hurt by his data release, and no intelligence agency has
said anyone was hurt. He has acted in a way that is consistent with
a strong belief in the ideals of the U.S. founding documents,
including in freedom and privacy.

But
it's also hard to judge his ideas about the problem that he has
brought to light. Is he arguing that the government shouldn't do any
surveillance or intelligence collection? How does he reply to the
people who are worried about terrorists? There are officials who say
antiterrorism is an important social need, and what Americans don't
know about surveillance won't hurt them. They say that many people
voluntarily put personal information on the internet, so why should
they expect privacy? In short, how much privacy do people need?

There
is an ideological conflict between those who think that the
government should have access to any electronic information to track
criminals and terrorists, and those who think privacy is a right.
Neither extreme is practical, but both can make arguments to support
their extreme. So we must consider what privacy is for and what it
is worth. These are philosophical questions as well as practical
ones. Is it possible to balance the practical with the idealism, and
the personal vs. social?

People
have an instinctive, emotional desire for privacy, especially if they
think they are around people they don't trust. If others aren't
trustworthy, they may use embarrassing information for blackmail or
coercion. But once people feel safe in a situation, they are less
worried about protecting themselves, and there are rewards for being
trusting. People who are charming or good leaders tend to reveal
more about themselves in order to get people to like them and to do
what they want. So even on this non-rational level, privacy is in a
balance with openness.

When
it comes to social policy, a rational analysis is necessary. We
can't decide how private other people need to be based on our own
feelings. We have to break up the problem into several cases (but
this may not be an exhaustive list):

1.
Privacy for criminals. These include protests against the
government, since these can be defined as criminal by the government,
but the protest can have a higher principle or oppose the laws
themselves.

2.
Privacy for business secrets or competitive advantage.

3.
Privacy for military.

4.
Privacy of sexual relationships.

5.
Privacy for making arts or simply for making harmless mistakes,
because the thought that someone is watching will keep a person from
trying some action that is novel

6.
Privacy as a basic, irrevocable right that the government can't take
away

All
these facets of the issue are different, and they can't all be
covered in detail here. Some of the cases are easy to agree on. For
the first case, it is easy to see why a criminal wants privacy,
because without it someone will try to stop them. Clearly, this is a
case for a social agreement to invade the privacy of individuals to
investigate crimes. The legal and police systems are set up
according to that agreement. If someone breaks the law, their
privacy will be invaded. Even a suspect of a crime may be
investigated, within accepted rules and limits such as those in the
Bill of Rights.

Of
course, no system is perfect. The government can make laws that no
one likes, and then label the protesters against those laws as
criminals. It can keep secrets, and prosecute anyone who reveals the
secrets. Snowden is charged under the Espionage Act, a law to
prevent spying, and any trial would be held in secret and without
public oversight. Hence, the law creates its own Catch 22: any
effort to inform the public about the law is defined as illegal, but
the only way to get rid of the law is by public opposition.

Daniel Ellsburg, the whistleblower who published the Pentagon Papers, said that whistleblowers are important. But the courage for a person to support the country or the president is easier and much more common (even in the face of death) than whistleblowers who may loose their jobs, clearances, or freedom to oppose the social conventions. In trials, they can't make a case or explain their motives in open court. He said that Snowden or Chelsea Manning wouldn't have been heard in open civil court [2].

Snowden echoed the same idea, saying, "Whistleblowers are really rare and they have to be willing to strike a match to their whole life and burn it." [1]

Case
2 is generally considered almost sancrosant in a capitalist society.
Every business is expected and allowed to keep secrets. Fortunately,
the Founders set up the patent system, which allows businesses and
individuals to publish their methods as patents and still own the
rights to them as property.

Case
3 is also often unquestioned, as long as there is a legitimate need
for national defense. The big problem with privacy for national
defense is when "endless" wars are declared, like the war
on terrorism or the war on drugs. The government, or the
military/industrial/government complex and the associated special
interests, can use the endless war as protection for indefinite
funding and corruption. Citizens should be skeptical of calls for
endless wars for this reason. Anything that is labeled as a “war”
should be an existential threat to the country that has a definite
enemy to be defeated.

Governments
should also be concerned about the harm that can be done from a
security state. Roger Ebert wrote,

"But
the movie [The
Lives of Others]
is relevant today, as our government ignores habeas corpus, practices
secret torture, and asks for the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on
its citizens. Such tactics did not save East Germany; they destroyed
it, by making it a country its most loyal citizens could no longer
believe in." [3]

The
endless war on terrorism can also be questioned in terms of whether
it is really effective. Kade Crockford from the ACLU said that
dragnet surveillance is a lousy method for preventing terrorism. The
NSA failed to prevent 9/11 or Boston marathon bombing. It is good
for social control, and hence it is used by authoritarian
governments. Terrorism is prevented by investigating crimes with
probable cause, consistent with rights in the Constitution. NSA has
stopped zero terrorist threats from electronic surveillance. [2]

One
can argue that the other three cases deserve unrestricted privacy
subject to personal choice. Case 4 is a case for personal choice
about sexual relationships, either to reveal relationships or not,
unless there is a specific dispute that may affect others. Cases 5
and 6 are related in that they assume a personal right to privacy
that can't be violated.

Snowden
has strong feelings about a right to privacy. Snowden said in a
published interview,

"So
when we think in the context of the last decade’s infringements
upon personal liberty and the last year’s revelations, it’s not
about surveillance. It’s about liberty. When people say, “I have
nothing to hide,” what they’re saying is, “My rights don’t
matter.” Because you don’t need to justify your rights as a
citizen—that inverts the model of responsibility. The government
must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending
your rights by saying, “I don’t need them in this context” or
“I can’t understand this,” they are no longer rights. You have
ceded the concept of your own rights. You’ve converted them into
something you get as a revocable privilege from the government,
something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has
diminished the measure of liberty within a society." [4]

The
general emotional reaction or the legal right to want a privacy right
can be hard to accommodate with modern technology. Anyone who uses
the internet, a cell phone, or a credit card, leaves a "footprint"
in electronic records. Even if the message content is encrypted,
there may be a record of the source address and destination. Because
information on the internet is send as small packets of data, it is
necessary to collect all information in order to get the specific
packets that make up a phone conversation or a document. One option
is to stay off all electronic media, but this is a Luddite solution
to stop technological advance. An effort to encrypt all information
takes a constant vigilance by an individual.

Ultimately,
the problem of privacy doesn't yield to any simple or ideologically
pure answers. In some ways, it is a kind of arms race between those
collecting information and those keeping it secret. Snowden made a
contribution to publicizing the nature of the arms race and the
involvement of the government. It is the responsibility of the rest
of us to be vigilant about who is getting information about us and
what they are doing with it.

References

1.
Edward Snowden gave a presentation at Johns Hopkins University
Schriver Hall as part of the Foreign Affairs Symposium, a student-run
lecture series. He gave it via Google Hangouts videophone. The talk
was moderated by Daniel J. Solove, the John Harlan Marshall Research
Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, on
Wed., Feb. 17, 2016.

3.
Roger Ebert, review of the film "The Lives of Others,"
2007. rogerebert.com

4.
Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen, "Snowden: 'I Did
What I Did Because I Believe It Is the Right Thing to Do,'"
Edward Snowden interview in The Nation magazine, reprinted
on alternet.org,
Nov. 11, 2014.

By Mathew GoldsteinCell aggregation and differentiation are requisite for organisms such as animals to be multicelled. Various biological regulatory mechanisms producing the modifications to proteins responsible for tissue differentiation have been identified and studied. It has been known for some years now, outside of places of religious worship and "education" where knowledge inconvenient to the religious beliefs tends to be ignored or dismissed, that the same cellular mechanisms utilized for animal tissue differentiation are also present in choanoflagellates. But it has been unclear why choanoflagellates, flagellate eukaryotes (cells with a nucleus and mitochondria) whose full life cycle remains uncertain, posses these gene expression regulatory tools.

Choanoflagellates are not the only unicellular flagellate eukaryotes. Capsaspora is the genus of another single celled flagellate eukaryote species with a known life cycle that is closely related to choanoflagellates. A single
Capsaspora changes its cell type over time, transitioning from a lone amoeba to an aggregated colony of cells to a hardy cystic form. A new study explored whether Capsaspora uses the same mechanisms to control cell differentiation over time as animals use to control differentiation of tissues during embryo development.

The answer is yes according to researchers at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain who collaborated with researchers from the Proteomics Unit of the Centre for Genomic Regulation and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. A press release published by Science Daily stated that the "researchers discovered that from one stage to another, Capsaspora's suite of proteins undergoes extensive changes, and the organism uses many of the same tools as multicellular animals to regulate these cellular processes."

Without logic anything goes because the facts provide no constraints on our conclusions. Logically, if a god created the many species of life then that god must have been willing to deceive us by leaving us with evidence that multicellular animals evolved from unicellular flagellate eukaryotes similar to choanoflagellates and that humans are primates. But what is mere human logic as compared to a mighty god? Gods are supernatural so they can be said to do anything. Therefore logic no longer applies wherever a god is said to operate. Theism thus undermines human reason and that is a big price to pay.

Saturday, October 08, 2016

By Mathew GoldsteinJournalist Chris Hedges slams Sam Harris, claiming that the latter advocates for a nuclear attack against Islamic countries in his book End of Faith. Donald McCarthy recently wrote an article that was then promoted on this blog. That article reiterates what Hedges keeps claiming about Harris and further implies that Harris is dishonest because Harris denies what Hedges asserts about him.An honest reading of what Harris says in his book is that he is worried about the larger implications of the apocalyptic ideology of pro-suicide Islamic extremists, who think it is a strength and virtue that "we love death more than you love life". In particular, Harris argues that the religious beliefs adopted by Islamic extremists undermines the viability of Mutually Assured Destruction that has successfully prevented a nuclear conflict since the end of World War II. Harris devotes only one paragraph to this topic in his book. He says that if such Islamic extremists obtained nuclear weapons then the risk of nuclear conflict increases, an outcome which he clearly asserts he does not want.Harris ended that paragraph in his book with "... men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it." Now, if Chris Hedges, or Donald McCarthy, or anyone else, disagrees with that argument then they can make a counter-argument. They are not doing that here. Instead, they are misrepresenting his argument, emphasizing a single sentence, out of context, as evidence for what he is allegedly advocating. Harris is guilty of using provocative "first strike" language, but not of advocating for that outcome. Some criticisms of some of what Harris argues are constructive, and I like to see that, but some of it is not.

Wednesday, October 05, 2016

Mathew GoldsteinDonald Trump's signature proposal on stopping or restricting Islamic immigrants is, like his other proposals, unclear because it changes and is not fully described. Is it possible to reliably identify who is Islamic? I am skeptical. What is the most effective way to the vet immigrants? Do we have good reason to think that fewer immigrants would be effective in preventing homeland attacks? How do we measure the additional risk of threat of attacks from accepting more immigrants? What level of risk should be required to justify an immigration shutdown? What are the repercussions? I do not know and it is because I am an ignoramus that I am inclined to refrain from discussing complicated issues like this.

Nevertheless, I can say, based on what I have read, that there is solid evidence of ongoing efforts to carry out attacks in Europe, and to encourage lone wolf attacks, that rely on religious belief based appeals. Therefore, a review of immigration policies that includes considering options to take into account religious beliefs when vetting immigrants is not automatically an example of racism, or a violation the Establishment Clause, or Islamophobia, or siding with the religious right, or whatever the hell the latest knee jerk invective is favored by those who seek to try to shut down discussion. When we set our immigration policies we should do our best to take into account the needs of refugees in addition to the risks and try to strike a sensible balance. If more people die in car accidents every week than are killed by immigrants every year then restricting immigration is probably not justified. Otherwise, in the long term, if reduced immigration succeeded in preventing attacks then we could end up accepting more immigrants than we would have if we had instead experienced major attacks and reacted by shutting down immigration.

Trump is terribly wrong in so many ways about so much, which appears to tragically be an unavoidable result for any Republican presidential nominee in 2016 given how that demographic votes. The bombastic Trump, given his populist track record, and his divisive rhetoric, taints any proposals he makes while engaging in election year posturing in front of the electorate. A partial immigration slowdown that tries to reduce risks from accepting immigrants is not inherently crazy or irresponsible, although a policy that rejects everyone who is Islamic, as suggested by Trump, is difficult to justify. Being Islamic says too little about the person. But if there is a strong enough positive correlation between criminal violence and being Islamic among immigrants, or good evidence of ongoing dangerous plots and capabilities, then it may be justified to make that one of the considerations.

While Clinton currently expresses opposition to restricting immigration, if the context changed so that risks from immigration became larger in the future then I would not be surprised if she reversed course. I would prefer that she would say now, as a candidate, that reviewing immigration policy would be one option she would consider in the event that violence by immigrants became a substantial problem. I think Clinton has a track record of being pragmatic and thoughtful with respect to policy advocacy, more so than any other candidate, including the third party candidates. Regardless of what anyone thinks about the other candidates, this election is between Clinton and Trump.

The above commentary is my opinion alone, I speak not for anyone else, and in particular I am not speaking here for WASH.

Monday, October 03, 2016

Maryland is the home state of William O'Hair, a religious Baptist who is an author of an autobiography that is critical of his more famous mother (I have not read it). He is also a political activist and I watched him testify, along with clergy, at a 2016 Maryland General Assembly committee meeting in favor of a bill that proposed that the government support religion, arguing that it would be good for the state and country by reducing crime and delinquency, and labeling secular humanism a religion, while also criticizing his murdered mother and shilling for his book. Families with some members being religious and others not religious are common. I had a religious grand uncle (he was similar to a grandfather to me). I also have an opinion about William O'Hair's mother.

I requested literature and an application form to join her organization. After browsing the literature I decided not to join. She insisted that atheism was defined as having a set of specific beliefs that went well beyond not believing in gods, or believing that there are no gods, or believing that the universe is strictly naturalistic, or believing in a set of general ethical principles. She claimed that sharing her own conclusions on various political questions were part of the definition of atheism. She said if you don't profess those same conclusions then you are not an atheist. For her, atheism was a proper noun so it was capitalized. Everyone who was an atheist was an Atheist. Her Atheism was thus a political ideology, and it was so according to the definition of Atheism dictated by the Madalyn O'Hair.

My reaction at the time was that if I was looking for an ideology I could join a church. Her concept of Atheism was incompatible with my concept of atheism. My concept of atheism was (and still is) that it is a result of abandoning ideology, it is a conclusion derived from a refusal to be ideological, it is built upon a rejection of ideology. There can be no fixed answer to most public policy questions derived only from atheism because every issue must be evaluated independently, on its own merits, to find a best evidence fit with all the available evidence, and all of the relevant evidence is rarely confined to recognizing that the universe is strictly naturalistic. I became an AA member years later after the organization had mostly shed its ideological narrowness, although I got the impression that some of its membership remained O'Hair Atheists and my membership did not last long.

Nevertheless, she was smart, articulate, sharp, and she left behind some good commentary. Reading what she wrote, I cannot help but identify with her thinking more than with that of her disaffected son. So here is a sample from her writing from 1989: http://infidels.org/library/modern/madalyn_ohair/fundie.html

Saturday, October 01, 2016

By Mathew Goldstein

People who make a career of speaking and writing on current events may express opinions on a wide range of topics. Being concerned with what is happening beyond the borders of one's own country is not a vice and focusing exclusively on what happens in one's own country is not a virtue. Hopefully people who advocate on current affairs will make an effort to be well read and informed on whatever topic they discuss, but few people are experts on every topic that they discuss. Sometimes their advocacy may consistently fit within a particular group's consensus view, such as a leftist group view, or a libertarian group view, or a centrist group view, or a rightist group view. Sometimes an individual's advocacy may not consistently fit within any one group's consensus. Regardless, their advocacy is their own, they do not represent anyone else. This is true of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others. People who publicly self-identify as atheists do not uniquely forfeit their right to speak or write on other subjects.

Some years ago, Christopher Hitchens concluded the world would be better without Saddam Hussein ruling Iraq. He also said that people who denied that waterboarding was torture were clearly wrong. His views were not consistently within a consensus of the right or left. However aggravated some people may be about his sometimes straying from the consensus on the left, his advocacy was not for the purpose of siding with "fundamentalists in the U.S." who are not a monolith and who did not all share Hitchens' views on the invasion of Iraq. Many Democrats voted for the resolution that authorized potential military action in 2002. John Kerry gave a January 23, 2003 speech to Georgetown University where he said "Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator; leading an oppressive regime he presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real." In early 1998 Hillary Clinton said "The Iraqi leader was "without conscience," having used weapons of mass destruction on "his own people," she told reporters, referring to poison gas attacks on Kurds a decade earlier, "We are facing an extraordinary threat from this man. Something will have to be done." In December 2003 Hillary Clinton said "I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote" and was one that "I stand by." After new evidenced emerged that Saddam Hussein had been bluffing regarding possessing weapons of mass destruction, some people switched their position on that invasion after the fact.

Articles in the monthly WASH have sometimes ventured into discussions on what is happening outside of our country. One WASH member has invited the DC area atheist group to showings of various films in liberal churches that criticize Israel. One of the films featured a women who also claims that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center were carried out by the CIA. I have not seen any of those films, but I suspect that they are one sided propaganda which appears to be commonly relied upon among some critics of Israel. Black Lives Matters, for example, has asserted that Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinian population, which even if it were true is not a reason for police shootings in Arkansas or Louisiana. But while they are wrong about Israel committing genocide, and they harm their own credibility by indulging in such hyperbole, there is longstanding evidence for racial disparities in the U.S. and there are also similar disparities between different groups of people in other countries. If WASH is going engage in such topics then we lack integrity if we simultaneously shut down conversations on international affairs that fall outside a narrow range or insist that any atheists who take positions outside of a narrow range are tainting secularism. The people who are actually tainting secularism are those who want to engage in such discussion while restricting the range of views that are expressed to those that promote their own views.

It is a problem that people wrongly and unfairly associate Christopher Hitchens' views on various other topics, or Sam Harris' views on various other topics, or Richard Dawkins' views on various other topics, with "New Atheism". It doesn't help that some of the criticisms leveled against some of the New Atheists are more hyperbole and slander than reasonable or thoughtful criticism. People who, five years after Mr. Hitchens has died, continue to spill ink asserting that Christopher Hitchens tainted the New Atheism with his other advocacy are conflating apples with oranges. He could do no such thing since each different topic stands on its own and is addressed on its own merits independently. The problem here resides on the side of those who persistently make this odd complaint. Some people are intolerant of particular opinions. Such people may then reject everything that a person advocated or did in their life because they sincerely disagree with some things that one person advocated or did. That narrow-minded stereotyping is what we should be criticizing.

The view that all religions are mistaken, yet some religions are better than others in practice, or even in content, can be a difficult position to publicly espouse because it may be deemed to be insulting by the people who self-identify with the religions being targeted for criticism. If the people who self-identify with the religions being criticized are numerous and intolerant then their hearing such an argument is likely to upset them, which will generate controversy, and that result in turn will upset other people, who will blame the messenger. But the disliked messenger is not the problem because the message is untidy. Sometimes to resolve a problem we need to be willing to confront it head on. If a problem is fear of heights then exposing yourself to heights is a necessary step to overcome that fear. If a problem is an intolerance of criticism then we are not going to make things better by shutting down discussion to appease the intolerance.

Sam Harris in particular, among others, has adopted this position. He says that beliefs matter and therefore details that vary between religions and within religions also matter. The beliefs promoted by some religions are relatively harmless, or they harm some of the believers and not others, while different beliefs promoted by other religions are more insidious. Obviously, religion is grounded in beliefs, which are not genders, ethnicities, races, or the like. It is a fact (not a diversionary tactic) that some people, when they hear criticisms focused on the details associated with particular religions, or comparisons among religions that do not reach similar conclusions about all religions, assume that they are listening to a bigot promoting bigotry. That is a form of prematurely cutting off discussion, it is anti-intellectual, it is a mistake. Arguments need to evaluated on their merits and not on how closely they conform with our preferences or our pre-commitments.

People are capable of changing their beliefs. People are not synonymous with their beliefs and we do ourselves no good by elevating some beliefs to a status of being exempt from criticism. The liberal idea is that people are entitled to civic equality before the law regardless of their religious beliefs, it is not that particular religions as currently practiced are individually exempt from public criticism. I once joined a discussion that others had initiated about Scientology, with some people being critical. I sided with the critics. I was promptly challenged on why I was singling out that one religion. My reply was that it is in some substantial ways worse than other religions. As liberals and secularists living on a religious planet we undercut ourselves when we refuse to acknowledge that there are differences between and within religions which potentially have significant implications.

The aforementioned Dragoncon video advocates for practicing the street epistemology that is promoted in Peter Boghassian's book
A Manual for Creating Atheists. We are told that the partisan book title originated with the publisher as a marketing ploy. I have read the book and I will say that title has some merit as a description of the book's content. Nevertheless, epistemology is about the quality of belief justification and learning to recognize and avoid common pitfalls such as confirmation bias. Atheists are prone to employing bad epistemology.
So this topic is more general than atheism versus theism. It is addressed to, targets, and challenges, all of us. Atheism is merely a conclusion. How we go about reaching our conclusions is a skill that can be honed which affects the conclusions we reach across the wider range of decisions we confront. The web site for volunteer participants is https://streetepistemology.com/

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